aker

“Dorkbot’s raw, unfinished presentation style creates the atmosphere of a personal tour through each participant’s workshop, garage, or playspace.”

Paulos and Leyh were in attendance when Marcelo held the first Dorkbot-SF meeting in a hacker household during the summer of 2002. I was also at the first Dorkbot-SF — as a presenter. I felt a bit out of place, considering the strangest thing I’ve done with electricity is create the tangle of extension cords, multi-outlet strips, adapters, and assorted cables behind my desk. But Marcelo had invited me to help launch Dorkbot-SF with a pot-stirring discussion on the sticky relationship between hackers, artists, merry pranksters, and the media.

That night, Brian Normanly really provided the appropriate opening ceremony for Dorkbot-SF. He took the audience outside to gather around the utility pole. Normanly, who resembles an old-time carnival barker, explained the tools and techniques necessary to “liberate and redistribute electricity” — essentially by tapping into the power lines before they reach the utility company’s power meters.

Since then, a dozen Dorkbot-SF sessions have been held at various locales, from the Abstrakt Zone live/work loft in post-industrial Oakland, to the minimalist Rx Gallery-cum-sake bar. The events are always standing room only, filled with riot nrrrds eager to listen, learn, and libate. Each evening’s program of two or three presenters, selected by Marcelo with input from her co-conspirators, is nothing if not eclectic. Some presentations are polished, many ramble, and a few are incomprehensible train wrecks. But all are interesting.

“Dorkbot’s raw, unfinished presentation style creates the atmosphere of a personal tour through each participant’s workshop, garage, or playspace,” says Paulos, whose Dorkbot talk explored how new wireless technology may dramatically alter our relationships with the “familiar strangers” we encounter every day.

For example, Andrew Bennett showed images from his Absorption Dye Machine that “prints” digital pictures on a massive grid of white carnations. At another meeting, Leyh outlined his dream to build the Advanced Lightning Facility, a pair of 12-story high transformers that spit out 300-foot lightning bolts. Maribeth Back demonstrated an interactive children’s storybook — embedded with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags — that she developed at Xerox

PARC. And science-fiction author and mathematician Rudy Rucker ranted about cellular automata software and asked the packed house to consider that reality may actually be a highly advanced computer simulation.

The original Dorkbot was founded four years ago in New York City by Douglas Repetto, a computer-music instructor at Columbia University. Repetto had just moved to the city and was searching, he says, for “artists, hackers, engineers, activists, and crackpots hacking away in the back room on some obsession.

“I wanted to create an environment where lots of different sorts of people could come together and share those obsessions,” he says. “There’s something really compelling about being in the very room where something strange is happening. You’re not reading about it, it’s not streaming video, it’s not a photo slide show. It’s right there in front of you. Something might break. And that’s good, and invigorating, and exciting.”

After Dorkbot-NY was born, the meme spread like lightning. Now there are Dorkbots in more than a dozen cities around the world, from Melbourne to Seattle to Barcelona. When Marcelo first heard of Dorkbot from friends in London, she knew it would be a magnet for San Francisco’s tightly-knit population of geeks and gearheads.

“There’s an incredibly high density of engineers in this city,” says Marcelo. “Even if they can’t find work, they’re still doing interesting projects on their own. And San Francisco is small enough that collaborations can occur at the spur of the moment.”

Dorkbot-SF. Nothing’s shocking.

David Pescovitz is co-editor of the popular blog boingboing. net and a contributor to Wired and TheFeature.com.

48 Make: Volume 01